This white paper is the second installment in Blueprint for Enrolling a Diverse Student Body, a four-part research series about how to identify, engage, and recruit students from underrepresented populations.
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A proliferation of college access programs fails to combat under-enrollment of underrepresented minority (URM) and low-income students. Underrepresented minority and low-income students gravitate to community colleges—or fail to enroll in college at all.
College access programs need to reach more students to improve the pipeline of diverse applicants, but universities lack the resources and ability to build programs that support every student in need. Colleges and universities should scale the most critical aspects of traditional college access programs to increase college preparedness for more students.
Explore the strategies below to build and scale pipeline improvement efforts. These interventions seek to grow the pool of admissible students, increase the college-going rate of underrepresented students, and recruit them to the colleges and universities providing the programs.
Prioritize interventions that tackle school-wide and school-specific root cause problems
Rather than applying predetermined interventions, colleges and universities should identify the leading root cause barriers to college enrollment at each K-12 partner. Then, they should work collaboratively with K-12 partners to prioritize interventions that address specific barriers and tailor interventions to the needs of each partner.
- Collaborative K-12 Partner Needs Assessment: Employ a needs assessment to diagnose root cause barriers to college enrollment for students at K-12 partners.
- Data-Driven District Interventions: Use student record data to identify and prioritize interventions across highly populated feeder districts.
Facilitate student self-correction with personalized progress reports
Colleges and universities cannot serve every underrepresented student through preparedness programs, but they also must reach a larger number of students to grow a diverse pipeline.
Institutions need data-driven systems and tools that enable high school administrators, counselors, and individual students to pinpoint college preparedness gaps. Early warning data allows students to self-correct (and helps counselors prioritize students for interventions) and stay on a college-going path.
- Counselor Intervention Support System: Equip high school counselors with student-specific progress reports to target interventions.
- Student Self-Service Admissibility Reports: Provide students with self-service platforms to assess their admissibility and track their progress.
Read the other white papers in this series
A proliferation of college access programs fails to combat under-enrollment of underrepresented minority and low-income students. Discover how colleges and universities can increase the college-going rate of underrepresented populations through pipeline improvement efforts.
Supporting Parents of First-Generation Students
Parents are key influencers on college enrollment for all students, but the parents of first-generation students are less likely to expect their children to enroll in college than parents with postsecondary experience. Explore our white paper for four best practices to increase first-generation student enrollment by engaging their parents.
Delivering a Differentiated Application Process
To enroll more underrepresented students, enrollment managers must alleviate student concerns and minimize process barriers. Explore the nine best practices to craft an application process tailored to the needs of each underrepresented applicant.